State sponsored lotteries are a popular and accepted method of generating revenue in place of, or in addition to, taxes. One form of lottery uses instant lottery tickets on which number combinations are preprinted before distribution, thereby permitting the player to immediately view the ticket and know whether he/she is a winner. One system of distributing instant lottery tickets is entirely clerical with the tickets being stored in a drawer and counted out by hand. The clerk typically is responsible for keeping track of the number of tickets sold, making redemption payments and providing such sales and payout information to the state. The state then pays the store owner a commission or other monies due. Such a system has the disadvantages of being completely manual and requiring clerical assistance for the entire transaction. Further, the system has no significant security and is susceptible to shrinkage, that is, theft and accounting errors that result in lost revenue and tickets.
Another system for distributing instant lottery tickets is the instant ticket vending machine (“ITVM”), which is a stand-alone, unattended automated ticket dispenser. The ITVM accepts a customer's cash or credit card payment and provides a selection of lottery tickets corresponding to the payment. The customer then makes various ticket selections having a value equaling the payment. The ITVM monitors the ticket selections and dispenses the lottery tickets selected by the customer. Such a vending machine has the advantages of not requiring the attention of a clerk, being very secure, and providing a high level of reporting by keeping track of how often the machine is accessed to be loaded and serviced, when and how much money is collected, when and which tickets have been selected, etc. The vending machine may also include a printer for printing reports of machine activity.
While the above vending machine has many advantages over the clerical method of distributing instant lottery tickets, it also has several shortcomings. One problem with vending machines for such lottery tickets relates to the loading of tickets into a multi-bin lottery ticket dispensing machine. The long strips of tickets are provided in a batch or pack, and there is certain information associated with that pack that must be entered into the ITVM. With known ITVMs, that information is manually entered into the ITVM using a keypad or the like. Such a process is time consuming, labor intensive and error prone.
Another problem with instant-winner gaming tickets is that a relatively large variety of different games are developed to keep the ticket buyer's interest. This creates additional costs for the lottery ticket issuing organization, requires more dispensing bins per vending machine, and/or more vending machines to dispense the multitude of games that, in turn, increase the machine service requirement.
With known vending machines, ticket verification is often performed when the customer carries a winning ticket to a clerk in a store, who then inserts it into a machine, which reads the code on the back of the ticket and ascertains whether the ticket so identified is, indeed, a winner, and to verify the winning amount. When this verification is complete, the holder is paid the winnings. Although this procedure minimizes certain kinds of errors and fraud, it does not detect a ticket that has come into the possession of the holder by means other than by a legitimate purchase.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved ticket vending machine that addresses the above problems with known machines.